Prosthetic Conscience

• Shaving Horse Plans
  
• Portable Shaving Horse
  
• Alexander Cockburn: Creatures of Capital
  
• Squatter bobcats of doom! | nostate.com
  

  Anarchist discussion of property rights, with extra bobcats.

• Fuck the troops! | nostate.com
  

  A very challenging article. I prefer the motto: “We support our troops when they refuse to deploy.”

• Main Page - Open Source Ecology
  A radical outline of a sustainable, decentralized, high-tech village economy.
• The Raw Story | Denver cops get T-shirts that mock DNC protesters
  

  Denver Cops: We get up early to beat the crowds.

• The Partial Observer - Standard of Living vs. Quality of Life
  

  A fictional treatment of an optimistic future outcome of the changes we are living through today.

• Sad Sack Artists: Neil Strauss’s The Game and Tony Clink’s The Layguide
  

  A book review discussing how pathetic the members of the “pickup community” are.

• Virtue Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  

  An alternative approach to ethics besides the deontological and consequentialist approaches. I’m still not sure I buy this one, either. I find the justification problem very significant. On the other hand, it seems to lack at least one problem of the others, which is that they can be used to provide moral justification for coercing others to behave in desired ways, whereas it seems much harder to argue this from a virtue ethics standpoint.

Some of these are a little out of date given the unfortunate passage of the bailout act, but never mind.

• Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com
  

  An article from an academic economist opposing the bailout.

• The Outbreak
  

  A fun interactive zombie movie.

• The Wall Street bailout and the threat of dictatorship
  

  Excellent analysis in the WSWS of a very revealing article in the Unquotable Rag (Washington Post) by a member of the CFR. Basically, this guy considers the failure of the Wall Street bailout as showing that “American political elites have lost the ability to quickly respond to a national challenge by imposing their collective will.” And he considers that a bad thing.

  The writer of the analysis does engage in a little Constitutionolatry (unusual for a Commie) in saying that the Constitution did not replace the Articles in order to allow political elites to quickly impose their collective will. Of course it did! Isn’t he aware of the Anti-Federalists‘ objections to the Constitution?

  But it’s nevertheless an important analysis. The conflict over the bailout is the first time in recent memory that the elite media has outright failed in manufacturing the consent of the American people to the consensus of American elites. Representative democracy is pretty weak tea, but we haven’t even properly had that in years; it’s bracing to see what it actually looks like.

Aldo Domani Two Tone fountain pen w/mini ballpoint set

I found this at Office Depot for $16, a bit cheaper than the $22 their website lists it as. I was considering getting a new inexpensive fountain pen, as the clip on my Waterman Phileas is sprung, and I was thinking of the Foray Focus fountain pen in black. However, I happened to see this pen set, and my cheap side jumped out and made my try out the Aldo Domani.

• What it includes:
  
  • the fountain pen, which I’ll describe in detail below.
  • a rollerball converter for the fountain pen, consisting of a rollerball ink cartridge and point assembly, and a housing for the head end of that which replaces the fountain pen’s section & nib.
  • A mini ballpoint pen with a stylus point on the end.
  • A short standard ink cartridge.

  I haven’t tested the rollerball point, nor the mini ballpoint; I bought this only for the fountain pen. If I had a device that used a stylus, I might carry the mini ballpoint for that, but I don’t, and I don’t really have any reason to carry a ballpoint otherwise.

• The fountain pen
  

  The fountain pen, like the rest of the set, is actually made by Yafa, who I’ve noticed before make some cheap fountain pens for calligraphy sets and such. This pen is, according to the packaging, made of brass, covered with lacquer, and with chrome accents. It’s actually a fairly nice-looking pen, with a silver-gray barrel, a glossy black cap, and glossy black ends that look rather like cufflinks. It uses standard ink cartridges, and comes with a short standard cartridge. Note that it does not come with a converter (the Foray Focus I was also considering does).

  On opening the package, I loaded the pen up with a Waterman long standard cartridge, rather than the short standard cartridge it came with. The pen is a very nice substantial weight, much more solid feeling than my Phileas, about the same as my stainless Sheaffer Triumph Imperial. The cap posts very smoothly and solidly, and stays put. The nib is a medium, and is marked with “Aldo Domani” and “Iridium point, Germany”. The clip has a nice shape when looked at head-on, but is not very well constructed – the tip of it is folded metal like you’d see in a decent disposable gel pen, and it is very tight. It would not clip well to thicker fabric.

  One nice feature of this pen, which is not often found in very cheap fountain pens, is that the cap screws on and off. This makes it much more secure for carrying in a pocket or the pen loop of a notebook.

  My first impressions writing with this pen were that it is a very poor starter, but not a bad writer once it got started. On first using it, I had to shake it a bit and press down to get any ink to flow, but after that, it wrote okay, giving a wet line that was slightly wider than I like. After using it for a while, I found that it tended to be slow to start the first time it was used each day. This slow starting made the line quality slightly inconsistent, as it was rather dry starting, then tended toward being fairly wet. Even with these problems, I’ve enjoyed using it over the past couple of weeks as the pen-that-goes-in-my-notebook. The nib is reasonably smooth, and not at all flexible.

  I ordered a standard cartridge converter from PenCity; I had thought I had a spare from somewhere before, but apparently not. I cleaned the nib by soaking in cold water, dryed it on a paper towel, attached the converter, and filled it with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black. I don’t know whether it’s the ink itself, the act of drawing ink in through the feed, or whether I should have cleaned the nib in the first place, but the pen no longer shows the tendency towards slow starting that it did on the cartridge ink.

• Summary
  

  I give this pen a B+. It’s an excellent value for the very low price, assuming you can get it as cheaply as I did. Except for the cheap clip, the body of the pen is as nice or nicer than pens I have in the $30-$50 range. The nib is not great (not as good as even the Waterman Phileas, say), but it’s about as good as decent school pens like the Parker Reflex or Vector. The real appeal to me of it is that for hardly any more than a Reflex, I get an all-metal pen that will stand up to a bit more daily abuse than the somewhat flimsy Reflex.

• A brilliant comment at Charlie’s Diary
  This is a rant, but it’s a brilliant, fact-filled, linkified rant on everything that is wrong with the remains of the country we are living in.
• Got Medieval: The myth of pre-literacy
  

  Medieval blogging.

• Schneier on Security: The Two Classes of Airport Contraband
  

  If it’s dangerous, treat it, and the person trying to bring it onboard, as dangerous. If it’s not dangerous enough to do that, stop trying to keep it off the plane.

• Rad Geek People’s Daily How Portland Police Bureau Officers Joseph Cook and Judy McFarlane used a “welfare check” to throw Contia Orsby out on the streets
  
• Daily Kos: The Way Forward {Updated: Obama announces opposition to a blank check.}
  

  I hate to link to the Great Orange Satan, but this article is pretty insightful. Essentially, we are seeing the Shock Doctrine (disaster capitalism) used to consolidate even more power in the Executive than was granted to it after the September 2001 crimes.

• Naomi Wolf: The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State
  
• Rant: The Day the Earth Stood Still Remake Is Pure Sucky Evil
  

  I finally saw the original for the first time last night.

• BuyMyShitPile.com: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments too?
  

  Use the form below to submit bad assets you’d like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD “MMMbop”, it’s not what you can sell these items for that matters, it’s what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.

• Kansas City - Plog - Pirates duel with Phelps family
  

  God hates shrimp and poly-cotton blends!

• Charlie’s Diary: Straws in the Wind
  I don’t think it will come to that, but it certainly looks bad.
• HARDCORE ZEN: BIG FART CIRCLE
  

  Taking the piss out of a spiritual con-man.

• Why is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the “Homeland”? - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
  

  This article actually goes a little more into the rules they will be operating under.

• “Jonathan Lee Riches” tagged Cases and Lawsuits :: Justia News
  

  Master of the prisoner lawsuit.

• National Journal Magazine - John McCain. Youth You Can Believe In.
  

  The Law of the Excluded Middle is not in the Constitution! No one voted for it!

• Newsvine - The New Left?
  

  A really fascinating article using the “Mitchell Chart” from 8 Ways to Run the Country to explain political changes between the New Deal, the 1960s, and the 2000s. Does a lot to explain the rising prominence of libertarians on the Left.

• Lost middle-class tribe’s ‘secret’ eco-village in Wales spotted in aerial photograph taken by plane | Mail Online
  
• MIT OpenCourseWare | History | 21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution, Fall 2007 | Home
  
• The Anti-Federalist Papers
  

  Letters arguing against the adoption of the US Constitution, and for the limited amendment of the Articles of Confederation.

• Nader, Barr & Paul: ‘Told you so’ - Ben Adler - Politico.com
  
• So here’s the plan…
  

  Writer Ken MacLeod explains the US financial industry bailout with pictures.

• cryptogon.com:» U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team Assigned to NORTHCOM Beginning October 1st
  

  For those keeping score at home, NORTHCOM would be the US.

• Interventions: Science Fiction reflects on the contemporary period%u2026 « The Cedar Lounge Revolution
  
• Why is American liberalism bankrupt? A history lesson for New York Times columnist Bob Herbert
  

• Monbiot.com » Bring on the Recession
  
• Third Party Watch » Blog Archive » “We Agree”
  

  This should be big news: all the minor presidential candidates, from Left parties like the Greens, to Right parties like the Constitution party, agree on a set of statements that sharply distinguish them all from the Democrats and the Republicans.

• Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-09-13 On class consciousness
  
• Is J2EE appropriate for developing web apps?
  
• This is Your Nation on White Privilege | Red Room
  

  An interesting and timely list of examples of white privilege: how similar behaviours are viewed positively or neutrally when done by whites, and negatively when done by blacks.

• Edge: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt
  

  On the one hand, this article does a good job of showing how Republicans are successful in relating to the non-rational side of American citizens. On the other, its advice to the Democrats is basically more of “How can we learn to gull the masses that well?”

• Political Compass: US Presidential Election 2008
  

  Note that all of the major-party candidates, and Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr are in the right-wing authoritarian quadrant.

It’s nice that Chrome has Incognito Mode. But how incognito is it when your network admin can monitor the content of your traffic? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to switch your network traffic to a secure channel – like an SSH tunnel to an http proxy under your control, or TOR?

Firefox has the ‘Distrust’ extension that provides the same protections as Chrome’s Incognito Mode (other than the v. stylish fedora-wearing spy logo). And it also has your choice of extensions that let you switch proxies without going into the depths of the advanced settings menu: QuickProxy, SwitchProxy, FoxyProxy, and several TOR-specific extensions. Now if only Distrust had a setting that let one turn on their proxy for the duration of the Distrust session…

In Firefox, I have the Mouseless Browsing plugin installed, which lets me hit a key to label links with numbers, then type the number to follow the link. But even without MLB, you can browse mouselessly with the typeahead search – type ‘/’, then start typing the text of the link, and when the link you want is highlighted, hit enter. In Chrome, you can only tab between links, not jump directly to the one you want (even with the search function). That is, you can search for link text, and it will highlight it, but you cannot then select the link without tabbing to it from the beginning.

• al3x.net: al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness
  

  I could certainly dispute some of these rules. But the overall thrust of this is about right.

• Atomized � Blog Archive � On computing happiness
  

  And these are similar to some of the exceptions I’d make.

• U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity | Politics and Law - CNET News
  
• ParanoidLinux.org
  
• chartjunk � Blog Archive � Tax Plans (that’s one for you, nineteen for me).
  

  Nice graphical comparison of Obama’s tax plan vs. McCain’s. The lowdown: If you make less than $110,000 a year, you will get a bigger tax cut from Obama than from McCain. If you make more than $100,000, you will get a bigger tax cut from McCain, but your taxes will not actually increase unless you make more than $600,000 (which would put you in the top 1% of incomes in the US). Anyone making around the median income gets a much bigger tax cut from Obama than from McCain.

• London Stock Exchange suffers .NET Crash | Computerworld Blogs
  I wonder if the age of “you can’t be fired for choosing Microsoft” is coming to an end.
• Army, Sears Partner for 1st Infantry Division Clothing Line
  
• “Breakfast Stick” – what it is, ingredients
  

  For those confused and frightened by Cryptogon’s references to the nefarious Breakfast Stick.

• USGS Release: Silent Streams? Escalating Endangerment for North American Freshwater Fish: Nearly 40 Percent Now At-Risk
  
• Oil, sex & money: Federal agency accused of sleazy antics
  
• Think Progress » On 7th Anniversary Of Attacks, White House Claims Bin Laden Was Not The ‘Mastermind’ of Sept. 11
  Oceanea has always been at war with Eastasia. Please destroy any materials stating that we are or have been at war with Eurasia. That reality is no longer operative.
• Brian Katulis: The surge has not promoted political reconciliation in Iraq
  
• Newsvine - Sarah Palin: Dominionist Stalking Horse
  

  This is scary shit. If you don’t know what the Dominionist movement is, the article will fill you in.

• What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick | Salon
  

  More scary stuff.

• American Female Soldiers More Likely to Be Raped than Killed in Action
  

• Rad Geek People’s Daily: Slavery in Florida’s tomato fields
  

  Grow your own, y’all.

• May I Offer You My Calling Card? - TIME
  

  Via The Art of Manliness. Is the use of calling cards coming back into fashion?

• Civil Liberties Examiner: Fake or real, you are your ID
  

  Fake IDs are a thing of the past: bogus real IDs are the wave of the future-present.

• 21 Easy Hacks to Simplify Your Life | Zen Habits
  
• Sarah Palin’s Heart-less use of soft rock
  

  Trivial, but typical. No controlling legal authority.

• Rhizome Template in the Amazon?
  

  There was a time when I was very interested in the spatial organization of societies, and how that reflected their political economy. It would be interesting to know how non-hierarchical the precontact Xinguanos were, and why their apparently decentralized social structure didn’t protect them from demographic collapse at contact.

  Pop-sci link here.

• Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy for Libertarians
  

  A good list from Dan Clore. There were a few I hadn’t heard of on here.

• The Word From Wasilla
  

• Palin: Iraq war ‘a task that is from God’ - Yahoo! News
  I have promised someone important to stop bagging on Obama in public (I will leave that to Kevin Gray, who is better qualified than I am to do so), and to focus my poison pen on the republicans. So here you go. Bad stuff about Sarah Palin that’s not even personal slime on her dysfunctional family.
• BBC - The history of diaries in code
  

  Via Schneier on Security.

  Sadly, it seems as if there is almost no point in writing a diary in code anymore. If you wrote it by hand (using a shorthand, a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, or, at the extreme, the Vigenère cipher or an autokey cipher), then it would be trivially susceptible to modern cryptanalytic techniques. But to use a strong encryption scheme, you’d have to write your journal on the computer, which takes all the fun out of it.

• BBC NEWS | UK | More fish off the ‘green’ menu
  

  Oh noes, not anchovies! How will I make pasta alla putanesca now?

• Can We Escape
  

  A libertarian class analysis by Roderick Long. In general, I am less sanguine about private power than Long, and less comfortable with public power than Chomsky. But I consider Long’s “reasons for pessimism” in this article very insightful.

• Slingshot! Organizer
  

  A pocket organizer for radicals. I wonder if I can get an unbound one and add it to my rollabind journal, rather than adding a bound one to my pile of kit to lug around.

• Women of Steel to McCain: Palin wrong choice for working women, families
  
• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit
  

  Summary as I understand it: If you don’t want something yourself, don’t build it on the assumption that someone else will want it. You’ll probably be wrong.

• Clyburn: Conley can stay out of line
  
• Amy Goodman arrested at RNC
  
• Latest acquisitions of the Richland County Sheriff’s Dept.
  
• The U.S. Army Hires Out iRobot To Supply Military Robots
  

  The rise of the machines is inevitable…what I’m concerned about is which machines.

• «Con Barack è finita la politica nera: Obama è soltanto un bianco travestito» - Corriere della Sera
  

  An interview (in Italian) with Kevin Gray regarding his forthcoming book The Decline of Black Politics.